57 Inspirational Music Quotes

Music has an unparalleled ability to inspire, uplift, and connect us to a deeper part of ourselves. Whether it's the soulful melody of a classic ballad or the invigorating beat of a modern anthem, music resonates with our emotions and sparks our imagination. To celebrate this powerful art form, we've gathered a curated collection of the top 57 inspirational music quotes. Each quote echoes the profound impact music has on our lives, offering wisdom and motivation from musicians, composers, and music lovers across the globe. Dive into these quotes to find inspiration, renew your passion for music, and appreciate the universal language that transcends words.

1. “The only truth is music.” - Jack Kerouac

2. “One thing he discovered with a great deal of astonishment was that music held for him more then just pleasure. There was meat to it. The grouping of sounds, their forms in the air as they rang out and faded, said something comforting to him about the rule of Creation. What the music said was that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not always be just tangle and drift, but have a shape, an aim. It was a powerful argument that life did not just happen.” - Charles Frazier

3. “The world is teeming; anything can happen.” - John Cage

4. “Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.” - Edward Bulwer-Lytton

5. “People haven't always been there for me but music always has.” - Taylor Swift

6. “Anything can become music if listened to long enough” - Jeff Noon

7. “I am human and I need to be loved,just like everybody else does.” - Morrissey

8. “I still don't belong to anyone - I am mine.” - Morrissey

9. “With the world's fate resting on your shoulder - you're gonna need someone on your side.You can't do it by yourself any longer - you're gonna need someone on your side.” - Morrissey

10. “Disappointment came to me,and booted me,and bruised and hurt me,but that's how people grow up.” - Morrissey

11. “Kalkbrenner has made me an offer; that I should study with him for three years, and he will make something really - really out of me. I answered that I know how much I lack; but that I cannot exploit him, and three years is too much. But he has convinced me that I can play admirably when I am in the mood, and badly when I am not; a thing which never happens to him. After close examination he told me that I have no school; that I am on an excellent road, but can slip off the track. That after his death, or when he finally stops playing, there will be no representative of the great piano-forte school. That even if I wish it, I cannot build up a new school without knowing the old one; in a word : that I am not a perfected machine, and that this hampers the flow of my thoughts. That I have a mark in composition; that it would be a pity not to become what I have the promise of being...” - Fryderyk Chopin

12. “Play always as if in the presence of a master.” - Robert Schumann

13. “Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.' That's a rather broad idea,' I remarked. One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature,' he answered.” - Arthur Conan Doyle

14. “Close your eyes and I'll kiss you, Tomorrow I'll miss you.” - Paul McCartney

15. “The Devil has all the best tunes? My arse! Metalville just got a new sheriff.” - Mark Rice

16. “Don't be a drag.Just be a queen.” - Lady Gaga

17. “Or maybe memories are like karaoke - where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen's bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn't even know the lyrics to your all-time favourite song. Only afterwards, when someone else is up on stage humiliating themselves amid the clapping and laughing, do you realize that what you liked most about your favourite song was precisely your ignorance of its full meaning - and you read more into it than maybe existed in the first place. I think it's better not to know the lyrics to your life.” - Douglas Coupland

18. “Next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise. The gift of language combined with the gift of song was given to man that he should proclaim the Word of God through Music.” - Martin Luther

19. “Well, I sort of don’t trust anybody who doesn’t like Led Zeppelin.” - Jack White

20. “How can you understand the language of music, if you will not be an instrument?”—Zarost” - Greg Hamerton

21. “I see my life in terms of music.” - Albert Einstein

22. “Music is what I have to do, I only answer the questions so that I can do it.” - Jack White

23. “So many will try to destroy me. So many, over and over, coming in periods of greatness. But in this period, I cannot be broken: GAGAKLEIN.” - Lady Gaga

24. “The United States finds itself with forces of reaction. Do I have to demonstrate this? The Taliban's annihilation of music and culture? The enslavement of women?” - Christopher Hitchens

25. “V-Day…if you need this one day in a year to show everyone else you truly care for “your loved one” I think it’s quite stupid. I hate this commercialism. It’s all artificial, and has nothing to do with real love.” - Jess C. Scott

26. “It's like this when you fall hard for a musician. It's a crush with religious overtones. You listen to the songs and you memorize the words and the notes and this is a form of prayer. You attend the shows and this is the liturgy. You're interested in relics -- guitar picks, set lists, the sweaty napkin applied to His brow. You set up shrines in your room. It's not just about the music. It's about who you are when you listen to the music and who you wish to be and the way a particular song can bridge that gap, can make you feel the abrupt thrill of absolute faith.” - Steve Almond

27. “Mein gutes altes kroatisches Herz beschleunigte von Walzer zu Death Metal.” - Hallgrímur Helgason

28. “I've never known a musician who regretted being one. Whatever deceptions life may have in store for you, music itself is not going to let you down.” - Virgil Thomson

29. “This ain't the heartbreak hotel even though I know it well.Those no shows should you tell in the way you hold yourself.Don't you fret should you get another cancellation, give me a chance and I'll make a permanent reservation.In your heart in your, I can tell you fit one more” - The Wanted

30. “Yeah, you're a regular Mozart...well, except for the whole music thing.” - James Dashner

31. “The music lets me see the story but the story doesn't let me write the words.” - Elizabeth J. Kolodziej

32. “The chanting went on, the musicians giving in to the rhythm of their own being, finding healing in touching that rhythm, and healing in chanting about death, the only real god they knew.” - Karl Marlantes

33. “All we shared was a mattress, and a lie, and an addressBaby I don't need you, well baby I don't need youOnce occupied by a goddess, now it's a room full of boxesShe said, "it's time to leave you" but baby I don't need you! In a perfect world... her face would not existIn a perfect world... a broken heart is fixed” - Billy Talent

34. “Music was a balm for any weary soul. It could either lift a person out of the doldrums or comfort him if there was no other solace to be had.” - Lisa Lewis

35. “When she listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside her. A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out of the world like a witch.” - Arundhati Roy

36. “So cry if you need to, but I can't stay to watch you. That's the wrong thing to do. Touch if you need to, but I can't stay to hold you. That's the wrong thing to do.Talk if you need to, but I can't stay to hear you. That's the wrong thing to do. Cause you say you love me, and I'll end up lying and say I love you too.” - drake

37. “Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise".” - Stephen Fry

38. “Le nace a uno cierta melodía, la canta uno silenciosamente, en el interior solamente; toda la naturaleza individual se posesiona de la tonada y se deja uno llevar por ella por su fuerza y emotividad, y lo notable es que mientras se adueña de uno se olvida lo fortuito, lo banal y lo burdo, nos armoniza con el universo y nos da fuerzas y alas contra nuestra torpeza y depresiones.” - Herman Hesse

39. “I was only beginning to enter into the infinite subtlety of Gregorian chant. It was - and remains - the only public prayer I have ever been able to engage in without feeling like a phony and a jackass. But then, one day in 1965 or so, it was simply abolished. With a stroke of his pen, Pope John XXIII - who had such good ideas about other things - declared that liturgy would henceforth be in the vernacular language of the people. That was, effectively, the end of Latin chant.Then all those monks and nuns who had devoted hours and hours a day began to sicken and fall into depressions, but nobody noticed for a long time. Maybe, as I can well believe, the music toned up their systems in some mysterious way. Or perhaps chant really was a language that God understood. Faced with numerous liturgical scholas shrieking away in the new vernacular hymns, Divinity may have covered its ears and withdrawn, leaving the monks to pine. We parish musicians, illiterate in anything written after the 13th century, stumbled around trying to score liturgies for guitar and bongo drums, trying to make sense of texts like "Eat his body! Drink his blood!"It wasn't because the music got so bad that I quit going to Mass, but it certainly was the beginning of my doubts about papal infallibility.” - Mary Rose O'Reilley

40. “How does one say in the jargon of musicology that my sould was pulled out of me and thrown up in the air, to be tossed about by the music. How does one say that I breathed, that I existed, in harmony with the ups and downs of those notes. What kind of notes both elevate and cast down, exalt and crush?” - Yann Martel

41. “I won't look back to regret yesterday, we're not handed tomorrow so I'll live for today” - 3 Doors Down

42. “Of course Tucker Crowe was in pain when he made [the record], but he couldn't just march into a recording studio and start howling. He'd have sounded mad and pathetic. He had to calm the rage, tame it and shape it so that it could be contained in the tight-fitting songs. Then he had to dress it up so that it sounded more like itself.” - Nick Hornby

43. “The music at a wedding procession always reminds me of the music of soldiers going into battle.” - Heinrich Heine

44. “Because there's beauty in the breakdown.” - Imogen Heap

45. “Honouring the youth of their town they provided a décor that a £20-a-Martini fleecing parlour could not have amortized. They had bought eighty low Alvar Aalto stools for the alcove and coctail bar seating. Also, twenty tall numbers in the same bent bleach wood classic style. Extremely expensive and brought in from Finland at equally great expense.And in the first twelve months, ninety percent had disappeared. Compared to the catastrophic damage done every other week to one of the toilets just off the main dance floor --the level of masonry demolition going deep into the floor implied the use of a full-sized pneumatic drill-- the loss of a bunch of stools was incidental.The fact that thirty-two then turned up in New Order's rehearsal room was therefore coincidental. If you couldn't join in the public in stealing from your own club, what was the point of opening it?” - Tony Wilson

46. “For him and his brother, he now knew, that music was real. Becuase all you had to do, really, was be willing to use your imagination. And listen.” - Holly Goldberg Sloan

47. “I've never feared the unexpected.” - Kate Voegele

48. “The song being great in its own wealth, why should it wait upon the words? Rather does it begin where mere words fail. Its power lies in the region of the inexpressible; it tells us what the words cannot.” - Rabindranath Tagore

49. “The song reminds me of my life lately and the way things that happen devastate you so badly but then turn around and totally surprise you by growing into something unexpected and astounding. Of course, i could be wrong. I mean, who knows what the song is really about except whoever wrote it? But that's one of the many things about music that's so great. You can interpret a song and relate it to your life any way you want.” - Love Maia

50. “Come on you target for faraway laughter. Come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine!” - Pink Floyd

51. “For better or for worse, music is the language of memory. It is also the language of love.” - Jodi Picoult

52. “Kucheza muziki si lazima utingishe mwili kama mwendawazimu. Unaweza kucheza kwa hisia.” - Enock Maregesi

53. “Music is always a healer. Music has never let me down. I know it’s my religion. There’s the idea that you can’t truly know happiness until you know sadness, so how can you heal yourself unless you’ve hurt yourself? I’m still figuring out who I am, but I know that I’m not who I was.” - brendon urie

54. “But let me have silence always, in the centre of the shouting—that is essential! Let me have silence so that no pin may drop and not be heard, and not a whisper escape us for all our spouting, nor the needle's scratching upon this gramophone of a circular cosmic spot. Hear me! Mark me! Learn me! Throw the mind's ear open—shut up the mind's eye—all will be music!” - Wyndham Lewis

55. “You are what you love not who loves you"- Fall Out Boy” - Fall Out Boy

56. “So often, she had found herself transported by music. She would get lost, lose herself to the time and fullness of the tones, the way it conjured up air around her as she listened or as she played. But this, she thought, one did not get lost in this music.One was delivered by it.” - Kate Noble

57. “A collection of bad love songs, tattered from overuse, has to touch us like a cemetery or a village. So what if the houses have no style, if the graves are vanishing under tasteless ornaments and inscriptions? Before an imagination sympathetic and respectful enough to conceal momentarily its aesthetic disdain, that dust may release a flock of souls, their beaks holding the still verdant dreams that gave them an inkling of the next world and let them rejoice or weep in this world.” - Marcel Proust